I am a political activist who has worked and lived in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog chronicles my time in Palestine and also provides news and analysis about Palestine and the situation on the ground in the Occupied Palestinian Territories.

Thursday, May 30, 2013

as you may be aware, the Federal Coalition has announced that should they win the upcoming Federal election in September, they will seek to cut any funding to any individual or organisation that supports BDS. The Coalition has made it clear that this was including cutting ALL funding to individuals and organisations not only for BDS related activities but for any research, educational or other purposes.

This is an unvanished attack on free speech and academic freedom and must be rejected outright. Please find below my latest article on the Federal Coalition attacks. Please feel free to share with your social media networks.

The federal opposition has announced
that it will support sweeping attacks on academic freedom and the free speech
of any individual or organisation supporting the pro-Palestinian boycott,
divestment and sanctions (BDS) campaign against Israel.

According to the 25 May Weekend
Australian, a “Coalition government would block all federal funds to
individuals and institutions who speak out in favour of the Boycott, Divestment
and Sanctions campaign against Israel”. Julie Bishop, the opposition deputy
leader and foreign affairs spokesperson, who has previously labelled the BDS
campaign “anti-Semitic”, told the newspaper: “The Coalition will institute a
policy across government that ensures no grants of taxpayers’ funds are provided
to individuals or organisations which actively support the BDS campaign”. Funds
would be cut not only for BDS-related activities, but also for any research,
educational or other purpose.

The BDS campaign was initiated in
2005 by 171 Palestinian organisations and is inspired by the struggle of South
Africans against apartheid. It is conducted in the framework of international
solidarity and resistance to injustice and oppression and calls for non-violent
punitive measures to be maintained until Israel meets its obligation to
recognise the Palestinian people's right to self-determination and fully
complies with international law. Far from being “anti-Semitic”, it opposes all
racism, including Islamophobia and anti-Semitism.

In 2011, when similar charges were
made against Australian BDS campaigners, the Palestinian BDS National Committee
issued a statement saying such claims were “a cynical attempt to smear BDS
activism in Australia”. It noted that politicians in Australia and elsewhere
were “going to great lengths to curtail freedom of expression and shield the
state of Israel from any criticism”, but the real problem lay “with staunch
supporters of Israel who refuse to admit that universally recognised standards
of international law and social justice apply as much to Israel as they do to
any other state”.

Not unique

The attempt to paint pro-BDS
campaigners as anti-Semitic isn’t unique to Australia. In March, pro-Israel
pressure groups in the UK suffered a major defeat when they attempted to
repress Palestine solidarity activism, accusing the University and College
Union of anti-Semitism. On 22 March, the UK Employment Tribunal dismissed a
case brought by Academic Friends of Israel director Ronnie Fraser, who claimed
that BDS was anti-Semitic and he had suffered anti-Semitic harassment as a
result of the union’s pro-BDS policy. The tribunal dismissed Fraser’s complaint
as “without substance” and “devoid of merit”, saying it was troubled by the
claim’s “worrying disregard for pluralism, tolerance and freedom of
expression”. Similarly, on 15 December 2011, a French court dismissed charges
brought against 12 BDS activists for supposedly “inciting discrimination and
racial hatred towards a group or nation”. The ruling reinforced a July French
court ruling acquitting another BDS activist of similar charges.

In the wake of Israel’s Knesset
(parliament) passing a law in July 2011 making it an offence to call for a
boycott against Israel or its illegal settlements in the occupied West Bank,
Amnesty International noted that such laws have “a chilling effect on freedom
of expression”. Philip Luther, Amnesty International’s deputy director for the
Middle East and North Africa, called the anti-BDS law “a blatant attempt to
stifle peaceful dissent and campaigning by attacking the right to freedom of
speech”.

Bipartisan support for Israel

The Coalition’s attack on academic
freedom comes after weeks of non-stop reports, editorials and op-eds in the
Australian that have explicitly sought to equate support for BDS with
anti-Semitism. While the Australian, Labor and the Coalition have been
making reckless and unfounded accusations against BDS, they’ve had little to
say about Israel’s ongoing occupation and human rights abuses against the
Palestinians.

Bishop, writing for the Australian
Jewish News on 24 January, all but ignored Israel’s occupation and
apartheid policies. Rather than calling for Israel to cease its illegal
settlement building and blockade of Gaza, Bishop placed blame for the failed
“peace” negotiations on the Palestinians.

Federal Coalition leader Tony Abbot
has similarly failed to hold Israel accountable. Last December, Abbott attended
the Australia-Israel-UK Leadership Dialogue forum in London, along with
Israel’s deputy PM and other Israeli government officials. In a speech read by
Senator George Brandis on behalf of Abbott at the forum dinner, Abbott praised
Israel as a “bastion of Western civilisation in a part of the world where human
rights, including the value of respectful dissent, are not well appreciated”.
But Israel isn’t a bastion of human rights.

According to the Israeli human
rights group Adalah, more than 30 Israeli laws discriminate against Israel’s
non-Jewish citizens. In June 2011, Adalah noted “a further escalation in the
legislation and enactment of discriminatory and anti-democratic laws by the
Israeli Knesset between January and April 2011”, including laws that “threaten
the rights and harm the legitimate interests of Arab citizens of Israel on the
basis of their national belonging”. Adalah stated: “The laws concern a broad
range of rights including land rights, citizenship rights, the right to
political participation, the rights to freedom of expression and association
and the rights to a fair trial and freedom from torture and ill-treatment”.

Bipartisan support for Israel,
however, is a hallmark of Australian parliamentary politics. Labor prime
ministers Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard have given Israel unequivocal support.
Just days before the 2007 federal election, Rudd announced his undying support
for Israel at an event organised by the Australian Israel Cultural Exchange,
saying “Israel is in my DNA”.

In 2009, when Israel began its
three-week assault on Gaza, resulting in the death of more than 1400
Palestinians, including more than 300 children, Gillard defended the bombing.

Who is attacking free speech and
academic freedom?

Many of Israel’s advocates who’ve
sought to paint the Palestinian BDS campaign as anti-Semitic and an attack on
academic freedom are now supporting the Coalition’s sweeping attack on free
speech and academic freedom.

Colin Rubenstein, the executive
director of the Australia/Israel and Jewish Affairs Council, is quoted in the
25 May Australian welcoming the Coalition policy. Rubenstein, who had
previously signed on to a 2011 pro-Zionist statement denouncing BDS as
“antithetical to principles of academic freedom and discourag[ing] freedom of
speech” is apparently happy to support suppression of academic and democratic
rights in the service of Israel.

The accusation that BDS is an attack
on free speech or academic freedom is of course false. The campaign focuses on
institutions, not individuals, and doesn’t prevent any student or academic from
carrying out research, authoring papers or participating in conferences simply
because they are Jewish or Israeli. In Australia, pro-BDS groups have hosted a
range of Israeli and Jewish academics and activists, including the renowned
Israeli historian Ilan Pappe, who was the keynote speaker at the 2012 Australian
BDS conference.

However, the double standard of
Rubenstein and other pro-Israel advocates comes as no surprise. Rarely do
pro-Israel advocates who denounce BDS acknowledge the right of Palestinians to
academic freedom. Under Israel’s occupation, Palestinian education is severely
restricted. During the 1987-1993 intifada, Israel closed most
Palestinian universities, schools and kindergartens, making it illegal for
Palestinians to get an education.

During the first intifada, Birzeit
University was closed by Israeli military order 15 times, the longest closure
lasting four and a half years. Today, Palestinians are regularly prevented from
getting an education by Israel’s occupation – campuses often being raided by
the Israeli military and teachers and students regularly arrested, tortured and
killed. It is still exceedingly common for Palestinian teachers to conduct
classes at checkpoints because they and their students can’t get to their
educational institutions because of the apartheid wall and checkpoints.

Attempts to cut federal funding to
individuals or organisations that support BDS should be rejected by anyone who
supports free speech and academic freedom. Bipartisan attacks and dishonest
reporting by the Australian will not deter BDS campaigners. We will continue
to campaign against Israel’s occupation and apartheid policies and demand human
rights, justice and freedom for the Palestinian people.

Wednesday, May 22, 2013

Please find below the very good article by Ben Lynefield which appeared in the American Jewish Forward. The article examines the razing and ethnic cleansing of the Mughrabi neighbourhood in Occupied East Jerusalem in 1967. Today, it is quite difficult to find a lot of information easily available on the razing of the neighbourhood. As Lynefield notes in his article: "Its destruction is an event either unknown or repressed by most
Israelis and Jews who visit the Kotel. It is deleted from public
discourse about the Old City". Despite the fact that the Israeli state has attempted to erase what happened to the Mughrabi Quarter and its residents from public discourse, Palestinians have not forgotten.Lynefield's article offers some valuable information on the razing of the neighbourhood within days of Israel seizing and occuping East Jerusalem and the ethnic cleansing of up to 1000 or more Palestinians from their homes.

Forced Removal: Hours after conquering East Jerusalem in the
1967 war, Israeli authorities demolished the Arab Mughrabi
neighborhood in the shadow of the Western Wall. Those who once lived
there still mourn the loss of their homes.

JERUSALEM — Many Israelis marked the 46th anniversary of
Jerusalem’s reunification, as they see it, with the fanfare that
has become a staple of Jerusalem Day, the holiday first declared by
the government in 1968 to mark the historic event.

The May 8 celebration, which Israel’s chief rabbinate has also
declared a religious holiday, was punctuated by performances,
including the annual “march of the flags,” a large procession by
nationalist Jewish youth through the Arab neighborhoods of East
Jerusalem.

“We are celebrating the reunification of Jerusalem, the
nullification of the border,” Jerusalem Deputy Mayor David Hadari
told the Forward. “It was previously impossible to reach the
Western Wall, but it was liberated and the Temple Mount is in our
hands.”

In his comments, Hadari recalled the divided city that existed
before the June 1967 Six Day War, when Israel took control of the
city’s Eastern sector, ruled until then by Jordan and populated
exclusively by Arabs. Today, Hadari noted, Jewish neighborhoods are
expanding all over this sector.

But not everyone thinks there is cause to rejoice. The festivities
cut out the Palestinians, who make up 39% of Jerusalem’s
population. Unlike the city’s Jewish residents, Arab Jerusalemites
are not allowed to move to the city’s other, Jewish sector. And
many cannot find housing in their own sector of the city due to
planning policies that have been labeled discriminatory by civil
rights groups.

“They celebrate and we cry,“ said Mohammed Ibrahim Mawalid,
85, a resident of the Old City. “They celebrate the liberation of
Jerusalem as they view it. But we remember the disasters.”

One of the disasters that still haunts Mawalid is a mass
demolition that eradicated his old Palestinian neighborhood. It was
carried out at Judaism’s holiest site on the last day of the Six
Day War and the first day of the ceasefire. It was just a few days
after David Rubinger shot his iconic picture of young awestruck
Israeli soldiers standing before the ancient stones at the Western
Wall just after having taken over the area.

The soldiers then were standing in the Mughrabi Quarter, which
encompassed most of what is today the long, wide plaza in front of
the Western Wall. Its destruction is an event either unknown or
repressed by most Israelis and Jews who visit the Kotel. It is
deleted from public discourse about the Old City. But for some
Palestinians it is still a sore wound.

Mawalid’s home once stood in this area, along with 135 other
buildings, including three mosques and two zawiyas, or pilgrim
hospices. Palestinian historians say that some of the Mughrabi
Quarter buildings were more than seven centuries old, dating back to
the time of Saladin’s son, al-Afdal. But Israeli bulldozers erased
them June 10 and June 11, on the orders of Israeli Chief of Staff
Moshe Dayan, to enable large numbers of worshippers to come to the
Western Wall for Shavuot prayers the following week. Now, not even a
plaque marks the site. It is as if the Mughrabi Quarter never
existed.

“We still feel the pain,” Mawalid said.

Today, Mawalid is a frail man whose son works in employee
recruitment for the California state government in Sacramento. He has
other children in Oman and Morocco. But in 1967, Mawalid held the
post of mutawalli, the Jordanian government official responsible
for the Islamic properties in the quarter. This provided modest
earnings. He also supervised a cafeteria at the offices of the United
Nations Relief and Works Agency.

Mawalid moved to the Mughrabi Quarter in 1949 after fleeing the
village of Bir Ma’in (on the site of what is now the Israeli town
of Modi’in) during the Arab-Israeli war a year earlier. He says he
had to leave the village because of Israeli artillery bombardments.

In the Mughrabi Quarter, Mawalid’s seven-room house, about 100
meters from the Western Wall, was home to 15 people, including his
mother, brothers, wife and children. The house was white stone and
about 250 years old, he said.

According to Mawalid, some 1,500 people lived in the Mughrabi
Quarter, though other estimates put the total at around 600. Many,
like Mawalid, were originally of Moroccan ancestry. After the
demolition, the refugees dispersed to other locales in the Jerusalem
area and to Jordan and Morocco.

On the night of June 10,1967 — just as Israel was consolidating
its seemingly miraculous victory over Egypt, Jordan, Syria and other
Arab armies — Israeli bulldozers began demolishing the Palestinian
houses closest to the Western Wall. “We thought they were going to
make a road, to broaden a road to the Western Wall,“ Mawalid said.
He did not at first imagine that his entire neighborhood would be
razed.

One person died during the demolition. Rasmiya Abu Aghayl, a woman
in her 50s, was killed when a bulldozer demolished her house while
she was still in it.

“The order to evacuate the neighborhood was one of the hardest
in my life,” he said, according to the book “Accidental Empire,”
by Israeli journalist Gershom Gorenberg, which cites the May 1999
interview by Salman. “When you order, ‘Fire!’ [in battle],
you’re an automaton. Here you had to give an order knowing you are
likely to hurt innocent people.”

In a letter dated March 5, 1968 to the secretary-general of the
United Nations, Israel’s U.N. representative, Yosef Tekoah said
Israel destroyed the Mughrabi Quarter because it was a “slum.”
Responding to a complaint from Jordan about the quarter’s leveling,
Tekoah assured the UN that the “unfortunate inhabitants” of the
quarter had been resettled in “respectable conditions.”

Mawalid recalled that the quarter’s population included both
wealthy and poor people.

Mawalid and his brothers, mother, wife and children fled to the
Bab Al-Silsila (Chain Gate) area of the old city. “My wife, Halima,
carried makluba she had cooked with us,” he recalled,
referring to a Palestinian dish of meat, rice and fried vegetables.
“It was the only thing we were able to take.

“At Bab Al-Silsila I met a friend, Ibrahim Habib, who asked me,
‘Where are you going to go?’ He said, ‘Come to me,’ and he
gave us two rooms.”

Mawalid said the refugee families were offered $200 to $300 in
compensation by Israeli authorities for their losses.

Mawalid believes that transforming what was his house and the
Mughrabi neighborhood into an expanded plaza for Jewish prayer at the
Western Wall was “unjust” and a “usurpation.”

But, he is not seeking to turn back the clock. Mawalid says he
does not dream of the reconstruction of the Mughrabi neighborhood.
“This is impossible,” he said. “It’s a holy place for the
Jews, and they are dreaming of it for hundreds of years and they
achieved their dream.”

Rather, he would like to see the Jerusalem municipality build
housing for the refugees of the quarter. According to Mawalid, during
the early 1970s the municipality offered to build housing for those
from the quarter, but the designated location was on land that had
been expropriated from other Palestinians. “There is no way we
could take land that was taken from other Palestinians,” he said.

Amir Cheshin, who served as adviser on East Jerusalem to Mayor
Teddy Kollek during the 1980s, says he knows of no such housing
offer. The Mughrabi Quarter residents, he said, “certainly should
be given alternative housing as was done for residents of Yamit [in
the Sinai Peninsula] and Gush Katif [in Gaza]”

But Cheshin backed the decision to demolish the quarter. “In
retrospect, it was a smart act. Otherwise, the Kotel would have
remained a miserable alley. If they didn’t do it [in the war’s
immediate aftermath], they wouldn’t have been able to do it later.”

Hadari, the deputy mayor, flatly rejected Mawalid’s idea of
providing housing. “Jerusalem belongs to the Jewish people,” he
said. “We won’t accept any claim of this sort. Just as my
parents, who left Morocco in 1948, didn’t get anything for their
house, they won’t get anything, either.”

In fact, while Jewish residents of several Arab countries were
expelled and lost their property without compensation after Israel’s
founding, this was not the case in Morocco, which is still home to an
estimated 5,000 Jews. Michael Fischbach’s book, “Jewish Property
Claims against Arab Countries,” notes that Jews in Morocco largely
did not suffer large scale property loss upon emigration and adds
that those who left after the 1948 war were free to dispose of their
property.

Nazmi Jubeh, a historian at Birzeit University, in the West Bank,
considers the demolition “an absolute act of violence against
people and their houses and habitat. These are people who in a few
hours lost everything. We lost an eight-centuries-long tradition of
North Africans and Andalusians in Jerusalem that was an important
element of historic Jerusalem.”

Friday, May 17, 2013

an important article in Haaretz from Shay Hazkani on how David
Ben-Gurion, Israeli academia and government officials sought to
fabricate and rewrite history in relation to the Palestinian Nakba.
Please find the article in full below.In solidarity,
Kim ***

Catastrophic thinking: Did Ben-Gurion try to
rewrite history?

The file in the state archives contains clear
evidence that the researchers at the time did not paint the full
picture of Israel's role in creating the Palestinian refugee problem.

Arab refugees from villages near Tulkarm. Most historians say Ben-Gurion knew in real time about the expulsion of Palestinians.Photo by Bettmann/CORBIS

Prime Minister David Ben-Gurion during the playing of the 'Hatikva' national anthem, marking the Knesset's first session in Jerusalem.Photo by GPO

Ori Stendel. 'No [organized] expulsion activity.'

Palestinian refugees returning to their village after its surrender during the 1948 Arab-Israeli war.Photo by AFP

The Israeli censor’s observant eye had missed file number
GL-18/17028 in the State Archives. Most files relating to the 1948
Palestinian exodus remain sealed in the Israeli archives, despite the
fact that their period as classified files − according to Israeli
law − expired long ago. Even files that were previously
declassified are no longer available to researchers. In the past two
decades, following the powerful reverberations triggered by the
publication of books written by those dubbed the “New Historians,”
the Israeli archives revoked access to much of the explosive
material. Archived Israeli documents that reported the expulsion of
Palestinians, massacres or rapes perpetrated by Israeli soldiers,
along with other events considered embarrassing by the establishment,
were reclassified as “top secret.” Researchers who sought to
track down the files cited in books by Benny Morris, Avi Shlaim or
Tom Segev often hit a dead end. Hence the surprise that file
GL-18/17028, titled “The Flight in 1948” is still available
today.The documents in the file, which date from 1960 to 1964, describe
the evolution of the Israeli version of the Palestinian Nakba ‏(“The
Catastrophe”‏) of 1948. Under the leadership of Prime Minister
David Ben-Gurion, top Middle East scholars in the Civil Service were
assigned the task of providing evidence supporting Israel’s
position − which was that, rather than being expelled in 1948, the
Palestinians had fled of their own volition.Ben-Gurion probably never heard the word “Nakba,” but early
on, at the end of the 1950s, Israel’s first prime minister grasped
the importance of the historical narrative. Just as Zionism had
forged a new narrative for the Jewish people within a few decades, he
understood that the other nation that had resided in the country
before the advent of Zionism would also strive to formulate a
narrative of its own. For the Palestinians, the national narrative
grew to revolve around the Nakba, the calamity that befell them
following Israel’s establishment in 1948, when about 700,000
Palestinians became refugees.By the end of the 1950s, Ben-Gurion had reached the conclusion
that the events of 1948 would be at the forefront of Israel’s
diplomatic struggle, in particular the struggle against the
Palestinian national movement. If the Palestinians had been expelled
from their land, as they had maintained already in 1948, the
international community would view their claim to return to their
homeland as justified. However, Ben-Gurion believed, if it turned out
that they had left “by choice,” having been persuaded by their
leaders that it was best to depart temporarily and return after the
Arab victory, the world community would be less supportive of their
claim.Most historians today − Zionists, post-Zionists and non-Zionists
− agree that in at least 120 of 530 villages, the Palestinian
inhabitants were expelled by Jewish military forces, and that in half
the villages the inhabitants fled because of the battles and were not
allowed to return. Only in a handful of cases did villagers leave at
the instructions of their leaders or mukhtars‏(headmen‏).Ben-Gurion appeared to have known the facts well. Even though much
material about the Palestinian refugees in Israeli archives is still
classified, what has been uncovered provides enough information to
establish that in many cases senior commanders of the Israel Defense
Forces ordered Palestinians to be expelled and their homes blown up.
The Israeli military not only updated Ben-Gurion about these events
but also apparently received his prior authorization, in written or
oral form, notably in Lod and Ramle, and in several villages in the
north. Documents available for perusal on the Israeli side do not
provide an unequivocal answer to the question of whether an orderly
plan to expel Palestinians existed. In fact, fierce debate on the
issue continues to this day. For example, in an interview with
Haaretz the historian Benny Morris argued that Ben-Gurion delineated
a plan to transfer the Palestinians forcibly out of Israel, though
there is no documentation that proves this incontrovertibly.Even before the war of 1948 ended, Israeli public diplomacy sought
to hide the cases in which Palestinians were expelled from their
villages. In his study of the early historiography of the 1948 war,
“Memory in a Book”‏(Hebrew‏), Mordechai Bar-On quotes Aharon
Zisling, who would become an MK on behalf of Ahdut Ha’avoda and was
the agriculture minister in Ben-Gurion’s provisional government in
1948. At the height of the expulsion of the Arabs from Lod and Ramle,
Zisling wrote in the left-wing newspaper Al Hamishmar, “We did not
expel Arabs from the Land of Israel ... After they remained in our
area of control, not one Arab was expelled by us.” In Davar, the
newspaper of the ruling Mapai party, the journalist A. Ophir went one
step further, explaining, “In vain did we cry out to the Arabs who
were streaming across the borders: Stay here with us!”Contemporaries who had ties to the government or the armed forces
obviously knew that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians had been
expelled and their return was blocked already during the war. They
understood that this must be kept a closely guarded secret. In 1961,
after John F. Kennedy assumed office as president of the United
States, calls for the return of some of the Palestinian refugees
increased. Under the guidance of the new president, the U.S. State
Department tried to force Israel to allow several hundred thousand
refugees to return. In 1949, Israel had agreed to consider allowing
about 100,000 refugees to return, in exchange for a comprehensive
peace agreement with the Arab states, but by the early 1960s that was
no longer on the agenda as far as Israel was concerned. Israel was
willing to discuss the return of some 20,000-30,000 refugees at most.Under increasing pressure from Kennedy and amid preparations at
the United Nations General Assembly to address the Palestinian
refugee issue, Ben-Gurion convened a special meeting on the subject.
Held in his office in the Kirya, the defense establishment compound
in Tel Aviv, the meeting was attended by the top ranks of Mapai,
including Foreign Minister Golda Meir, Agriculture Minister Moshe
Dayan and Jewish Agency Chairman Moshe Sharett. Ben-Gurion was
convinced that the refugee problem was primarily one of public
image ‏(hasbara‏). Israel, he believed, would be able to
persuade the international community that the refugees had not been
expelled, but had fled. “First of all, we need to tell facts, how
they escaped,” he said in the meeting. “As far as I know, most of
them fled before the state’s establishment, of their own free will,
and contrary to what the Haganah [the pre-independence army of
Palestine’s Jews] told them when it defeated them, that they could
stay. After the state’s establishment [on May 15, 1948], as far as
I know, only the Arabs of Ramle and Lod left their places, or were
pressured to leave.”Ben-Gurion thereby set the frame of reference for the discussion,
even though some of the participants knew that his presentation was
inaccurate, to say the least. Dayan, who as GOC Southern Command
after 1949 ordered the expulsion of the Negev Bedouin, was not in a
position to take issue with the prime minister’s statement that the
Arabs had left “of their own free will,” despite being well aware
of the facts. Ben-Gurion went on to explain what Israel must tell the
world: “All of these facts are not known. There is also material
which the Foreign Ministry prepared from the documents of the Arab
institutions, of the Mufti, Jamal al-Husseini [He probably meant Haj
Amin al-Husseini; Jamal al-Husseini was the Palestinians’
unofficial representative at the United Nations − S.H.], concerning
the flight, [showing] that this was of their own free will, because
they were told the country would soon be conquered and you will
return to be its lord and masters and not just return to your homes.”In 1961, against the backdrop of what Ben-Gurion described as the
need for “a serious operation, both in written form and in oral
hasbara,” the Shiloah Institute was asked to collect material for
the government about “the flight of the Arabs from the Land of
Israel in 1948.”Nakba between the linesThe Shiloah Institute was an odd bird in Israel of the 1950s and
1960s. The idea of establishing a research institute akin to an
Israeli version of Britain’s Chatham House was conceived by Reuven
Shiloah, a Foreign Ministry official and former Mossad man. Shiloah
died shortly after he finished planning the new institute. At the
ceremony marking the 30th day after his death, the director general
of the Prime Minister’s Office, Teddy Kollek, announced that the
institute would bear Shiloah’s name and explained, “The
institute’s purpose will be to study current problems at a
scientific level ... The institute will also make known to the world
at large Israel’s views concerning the region.” The institute was
established in conjunction with the Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Ministry of Defense and the
Israel Oriental Society ‏(the umbrella organization of the
Middle East scholars‏). It was managed by Yitzhak Oron, a major in
the Intelligence Corps. A study by Prof. Gil Eyal of Columbia
University, proved that the institute worked closely with the IDF’s
Intelligence Corps, which regularly provided it with intelligence
documents. As a result, most of the papers written in the Shiloah
Institute’s first years were classified and not accessible to the
general public. Researchers who worked in the institute in the 1950s
described their activities as largely secret and considered
themselves civil servants in every respect. The institute’s studies
had a reputation for thoroughness and quasi-academic quality. In
1965, the institute came under the auspices of Tel Aviv University,
though its clandestine ties with the intelligence community continued
for many years thereafter, ending in recent decades. In 1983, the
institute changed its name to the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle
Eastern and African Studies.For Ben-Gurion, the Shiloah Institute was the perfect place to
conduct the type of study he wished to arm himself with. Still, his
request to the institute to collect material about “the flight of
the Arabs” seemed a bit unusual. Since the end of the 1948 War,
Israel had dealt with the issue of the Palestinian refugees almost
exclusively as part of the diplomatic struggle in the international
arena; hardly any attempt had been made to investigate this aspect of
the war. But there was at least one person in the Shiloah Institute
who knew something about the Palestinian exodus of 1948.Rony Gabbay immigrated to Israel from Iraq in 1950. After four
years in a transit camp he obtained a B.A. and subsequently earned a
doctoral degree in political science in Switzerland, completing his
dissertation on the Arab refugee issue in 1959. However, on his
return to Israel he found himself involved in a fierce controversy
with the Ashkenazi academic establishment after he accused a
well-known political science professor of racism.“At that time, many like me, of Mizrahi origin, who were
ambitious, saw that the door was almost closed to us, so many left
for Canada and America,” he says in an interview from his home in
Perth, Australia, where he has lived for more than 40 years. “I
ended up here and I do not regret it in the least.” Before leaving
Israel, Gabbay spent a few years at the Shiloah Institute as deputy
director. He was there at the time Ben-Gurion’s request had
arrived.It is quite unlikely that Ben-Gurion knew the topic of Gabbay’s
doctoral dissertation, since it had not gained much publicity in
Israel. Had he known, he might have looked for an alternative
candidate to write this study, which was to serve as the linchpin of
Israeli public diplomacy. A perusal of the book Gabbay published
based on his dissertation shows that, three decades before Benny
Morris published his groundbreaking book, “The Birth of the
Palestinian Refugee Problem, 1947-1949,” Gabbay’s study confirmed
what Palestinian refugees had been claiming since 1948. “In many
cases,” Gabbay wrote, “such as during the battle to open the road
to Jerusalem, Jewish forces took Arab villages, expelled the
inhabitants and blew up places which they did not want to occupy
themselves, so that they could not be reoccupied by their enemies and
used as strongholds against them.”Writing in the late 1950s, Gabbay drew on British statistics, UN
documents, the Arab press and a number of Israeli documents he was
able to obtain. He had no access to official IDF documents or to the
minutes of cabinet meetings, of which Morris availed himself in the
1980s. Gabbay became convinced that there had not been a policy of
systematic expulsion of Palestinians coming from the top, but rather
that Palestinians were evacuated at the direction of local
commanders ‏(such as Yigal Allon and Yitzhak Rabin‏),
although this occurred in “many cases.”Fifty-four years later, Gabbay is astonished to find that he was
able to depict the events accurately with so few Israeli documents.
“To this day I am still amazed that a researcher who was very
methodical and very objective was able to read between the lines of
open sources,” he says.Ben-Gurion’s unusual request to the Shiloah Institute was
accompanied by rare authorization to examine Israeli archives that
were closed to the public. The institute’s researchers were allowed
to peruse captured documents that had been collected by the
Intelligence Corps and, more important material compiled on the
subject by the Shin Bet security service, some of which had been
transferred from the Haganah after 1948. Gabbay: “We were told, ‘We
don’t know what to do with all this material, with this crate.’
So I went to Shin Bet headquarters for three or four days and went
through all the material. After that they burned it, of course they
didn’t give it to us.”But there was one stack of documents that not even the Shiloah
Institute team was allowed to read through. It consisted of the
transcripts of the cabinet sessions during the war, in which the
ministers discussed the Palestinians’ flight and, in some cases,
their expulsion by IDF units.‘Pure research’The file in the State Archives contains a letter Gabbay had
written on his research project after he completed the work, dated
August 26, 1961, and addressed to the director general of the Foreign
Ministry. Gabbay writes: “With the exception of isolated cases, the
flight of the Arabs was due to the cumulative effect of a number of
elements in the political, military, economic, social and
psychological realms ... Chapters 1-6 present documents, quotations
and other material which prove the ‘contribution’ of this or that
cause among the causes of the flight and underscore the blame of the
Arabs. Thus, for example, there is a clear proof that the Arab states
encouraged [Palestine’s] Arabs to flee, that the leaders fled
[first], that atrocity stories were made up, and that Arab military
leaders pressured to have villages evacuated from their inhabitants
etc. The seventh and last chapter cites the documents which prove the
efforts of the Jews to stop the flight.” Gabbay concludes the
letter by expressing “my hope that this booklet will faithfully
serve Israeli foreign policy.”More than half a century later, Gabbay recalls the conclusions
differently. As part of his research, Gabbay read Intelligence Corps
transcripts of local radio broadcasts of propaganda aimed at the
local population by the Arab armies that operated in Palestine. The
broadcasts, Gabbay says, did not support the Israeli claim about the
part played by the Arab and Palestinian leaders in the flight. “There
was no mention of the local Arab leaders urging the Arabs to flee,
that they ‘pushed them,’ as we claimed in our hasbara. I saw
nothing like that.” It is noteworthy that Benny Morris, who
researched the subject 20 years later, also found no directives by
Palestinian leaders or Arab rulers calling on the villagers to leave.In the conversation from Australia, Gabbay finds it difficult to
explain the disparity between his letter of 1961 stating that the
Arabs were to blame, and his account today. Only in Haifa, he says,
did the local leadership urge the Palestinians to leave, even though
the Jewish leaders there urged them to stay. That, though, was a
singular case and even there, the calls to stay were undercut by the
Haganah’s shelling of the Arab market, in which civilians were
killed. Gabbay denies that his work at the Shiloah Institute prompted
him to change the opinion he arrived at when he wrote his doctoral
dissertation.He insists that he and the others on the research
team ‏(Yitzhak Oron and Aryeh Shmuelevich‏) were asked only
to collect and summarize material.“What we did at the Shiloah Institute was pure research. In
other words, what we submitted, what we got our hands on and examined
was what we wrote. There was no fear. We didn’t know, we didn’t
think about public opinion, we didn’t consider anything like that.”Prof. Gil Eyal, who has studied the connection between Israeli
Middle East experts and the intelligence community, explained in a
phone interview from New York that the research study on the refugees
could in no way be viewed as an academic text. “Without going into
the motives of those who were involved, it is clear to me that this
study falls into the general category of public
diplomacy ‏(hasbara‏). Public diplomacy, even when academics
engage in it and make use of documents according to the research
methods of historians, is still very different from academic research
or from other forms of objective research. That is because in public
diplomacy, what to look for in the files and what to prove is set
forth in advance. Naturally, then, if there are other things in the
file [that do not concur with the goals], they are simply not
inserted into the study, because that is not what the authors wanted
to find.”Second tryBen-Gurion, though, was not pleased with Gabbay’s report.
Immediately after its completion he ordered his Arab affairs adviser,
Uri Lubrani, to write a new study. Lubrani assigned the project to
Moshe Ma’oz, now a professor of history specializing in Syria, then
a student at the Hebrew University and an employee of the adviser’s
unit. “I went into Middle East studies with the mind-set of ‘Know
the enemy.’ It wasn’t until I did a Ph.D. at Oxford that things
changed for me and I started to discover the Arab side, too,” Ma’oz
says by telephone.Ma’oz was assigned a number of researchers to assist him with
the study, and received a budget. He started to collect dozens of
documents, in Israel and from around the world. He interviewed
Israeli and British officers as well as Palestinians who remained in
Israel. The 150 documents and interview transcripts were cataloged
meticulously and prepared as a file of evidence. Ma’oz notes that
his findings were very similar to those of Benny Morris and pointed
clearly to cases of expulsion, particularly in Lod and Ramle. “I
don’t think I was biased or influenced by the boss,” he says,
“but it is possible that I over-emphasized the issue of the flight.
The dosage was different, because I was still under the influence of
the nationalist conception in which we were educated at school and in
the army.”In fact, the documents in the file of the State Archives
demonstrate the exact opposite. According to Ma’oz’s own telling
of the documents, they ostensibly prove, without exception, that the
Arabs fled of their own volition at their leaders’ orders. In
December 1961, before embarking on the project, Ma’oz wrote to
David Kimche, a senior Mossad official ‏(and years later
director general of the Foreign Ministry‏), to ask for help in
compiling the documents. “Our intention is to prove that the flight
was caused at the encouragement of the local Arab leaders and the
Arab governments and was abetted by the British and by the pressure
of the Arab armies ‏(the Iraqi army and the Arab Liberation
Army‏) on the local Arab population.”In a letter of summation dated September 1962, which Ma’oz wrote
to Lubrani after he had completed the task of collecting the
documents, he noted that he had fulfilled the assignment, and proved
what he had been asked to prove: “You assigned me to gather
material on the flight of Palestine’s Arabs in 1948 which attests
to and proves that: “A. Arab leaders and institutions in Palestine
and elsewhere encouraged Palestine’s Arabs to flee, and the local
notables, by being the first to flee, prompted the people to flee.“B. The foreign Arab armies and the ‘volunteers’ abetted the
flight both by evacuating villages and by their harsh attitude toward
the local population.“C. In a number of places, the British Army assisted the Arabs
to flee.“D. Jewish institutions and organizations made an effort to
prevent the flight.”Immediately after submitting the summary report, Ma’oz left the
office of the Arab affairs adviser and went to Oxford to begin his
Ph.D. studies. He was replaced by another M.A. student, Ori Stendel,
who continued to write the study of the Palestinian exodus. Shortly
after taking over from Ma’oz, Stendel met with Ben-Gurion, who
described the project as a “White Paper,” referring to the
reports by British commissions of inquiry in Palestine and elsewhere
in the empire. “I remember Ben-Gurion saying something like, ‘We
need this White Paper, because people are saying that the Arabs were
expelled and did not flee,” Stendel recalls. “As far as I
remember, Ben-Gurion said, ‘They did flee, but the truth has to be
told. Write the truth.’ That’s what he said.”Stendel continued to collect material for a short time. He is
convinced that the study he and Ma’oz wrote is a scientific work
that proves Arab leaders called on the Palestinians to leave, though
it does not avoid uncovering the cases in which expulsion occurred.
After all the material had been collected, Stendel was again summoned
to a meeting with Ben-Gurion, who wanted a summary of the findings.
“I told him that it is impossible to speak in terms of uniformity.
There was no [organized] expulsion activity, on the one hand, but on
the other hand it is impossible to say that we tried to prevent the
Arabs from fleeing in all parts of the country. I told him that I had
no doubt, for example, that there was an expulsion in Lod and Ramle,
pure and simple. He asked me, and I remember being surprised by this,
‘Are you sure?’ I replied, ‘I wasn’t there, I can’t tell
you, but according to everything we read and collected, an expulsion
took place there.”As we saw, the documents in the archive make no mention of
Stendel’s assertion that the research project included documents
attesting to expulsion. Stendel does not rule out the possibility
that an attempt was made to play down such documents, but rejects the
possibility that they were deliberately hidden. “There was no
guideline to the effect that this would be a propaganda study, that
things would be filtered in order to help with hasbara. In practice,
that might be what happened ... Obviously, we worked in the Prime
Minister’s Office and we wanted to help Israel in its struggle, so
it was natural that we would look for the truth to prove that we did
not expel people. It’s definitely possible that that was the
motive, but I don’t remember that Ben-Gurion or Lubrani said, ‘You
should do this and that.’”Stendel remains convinced that Ben-Gurion really did not know how
the refugee problem of 1948 was caused, because he was busy with
strategic affairs and did not take the time to deal with the
refugees. The proof of this, he says, is that he asked a number of
organizations to research the subject, so he would get a full
picture. “If Ben-Gurion had decided on a policy, then there would
have been a policy, and then also, let’s put it like this: I think
the Arab minority in Israel today would be a lot smaller. That is why
I think that Ben-Gurion did not exactly know. It’s possible that he
authorized an expulsion in one case or another, when he was told it
was important for security reasons; but my conclusion is that
Ben-Gurion did not authorize a policy of expulsion, and so he wanted
to know exactly what had happened.”Most historians who have researched the subject paint a radically
different picture. They present evidence that Ben-Gurion knew in real
time about the expulsion of Palestinians and apparently authorized
expulsions in a number of cases. In the absence of reliable
information from the period, it is difficult to determine with
certainty whether Ben-Gurion had actually persuaded himself that the
majority of Palestine’s Arabs had left of their own volition, or
did not even believe this himself but wanted history to believe it.In the meeting about the refugees at the end of 1961, Moshe
Sharett, then the chairman of the Jewish Agency, suggested a modern
spin: to leak the material that would be collected to foreign
correspondents so that they would publish it as “objective”
investigative reports without revealing their sources. “We need to
see to it that articles appear in the major newspapers,” Sharett
said. “That means we need to draw up a plan for each [foreign]
capital, decide on a ‘victim,’ who the man will be, provide him
with all the required information and all the arguments, and ensure
that extensive articles appear ahead of the General Assembly session,
because this issue is again becoming one of the more urgent ones.”Ben-Gurion apparently adopted this idea. In the office of the Arab
affairs adviser, Stendel did as he was asked and approached Aviad
Yafeh, who headed the Foreign Ministry’s information ‏(hasbara‏)
unit. According to a letter from May 1964, the two agreed to make
available the material that had been collected to a correspondent of
one of the major foreign magazines, so he could write a series of
articles about the “flight.” According to Stendel, the plan was
never implemented.Rose-tinted historyEven though the Ma’oz-Stendel report on “the flight of the
Arabs” appears to be lost for all time, the file in the State
Archives contains clear evidence that the researchers at the time did
not paint a full picture of Israel’s role in creating the refugee
problem. The story of how the study came to be written, juxtaposed to
the way the authors see it today, reflects the evolution of Israeli
society’s relationship with the Palestinian narrative of the Nakba.
In the 1960s, no one dared to admit publicly that Israel had expelled
Palestinians, whereas today, in the post-Oslo period and following
the research by the “new historians,” the subject of Israel’s
culpability is no longer taboo.After rereading the file in the State Archives, containing
summaries he himself wrote in the 1960s, Moshe Ma’oz sent me the
following email: “At that juncture I basically shared the views of
most Israeli Jews, and that of the establishment, that most Arabs
fled because their leaders escaped first and that other Arab leaders
instructed them to do so. On the other hand, I did mention that
Jewish organizations requested Arabs to stay and not to leave, but I
did not mention that many Arabs fled for [reasons of] panic, war,
massacres, etc. and that in certain places they were deported by the
army. Perhaps these facts did not appear in the materials or were not
known or appreciated.”Ma’oz, then, underwent a conceptual shift at Oxford. After
returning to Israel he worked for the military government in the
occupied territories, but says he identified more closely with the
Palestinians than with the Israeli government. Finally, he was booted
out of the military government by the chief of staff, Rafael Eitan,
after stating in a television interview in the early 1980s that
Israel should hold talks with West Bank leaders affiliated with the
Palestine Liberation Organization.Most historians in Israel and abroad no longer dispute the fact
that IDF soldiers expelled large numbers of Palestinians from their
homes during the 1948 war, and banned their return after the war.
However, the debate over whether this was a preconceived plan
authorized by Ben-Gurion continues. File GL-18/17028 shows that
throughout Israel’s 65 years of existence, the answer to the
question of “What really happened?” varied according to who was
responding. Still, it is unlikely that Gabbay, Ma’oz, Stendel and
Lubrani lied knowingly. More likely, they wanted to deceive
themselves and create a slightly rosier picture of 1948, a formative
year that changed the history of both the Jewish people and of the
Arab Middle East for all time.Shay Hazkani is a doctoral student in history at the Taub Center
for Israel Studies at New York University.

Monday, May 13, 2013

In the last few days there has been article after article on renown scientist, Stephen Hawking's withdraw from the President's Conference in Israel. Hawking has been praised by Palestinian and pro-Palestine solidarity campaigners and, unsurprisingly, he has been denounced by Israel and its supporters. Those decrying Stephen Hawking's actions and the Palestinian academic boycott of Israel claim that it is an attack on academic freedom. This is, of course, not true. The Palestinian academic boycott campaign is an institutional boycott, not an individual boycott, so academics are not prevented from carrying ot their research or from writing papers etc.

Where
the real double standard resides in relation to the cry of academic freedom is
in relation to Palestinian academic freedom. Rarely do you hear any of the
Zionists or supporters of Israel who denounce the Palestinian academic boycott
say a word about the right of Palestinians to academic freedom. Under Israel’s
occupation, the right to education for Palestinians is severely restricted and
limited. During
the first intifada, Israel closed down most Palestinian
universities, as well as just about all Palestinian schools and kindergartens
making it illegal for Palestinians to get an education. During the first
intifada, Birzeit University was closed by Israeli military order 15 times,
with the longest closure bing 4.5 years from 1988 to 1992. I
have many Palestinian friends who recount how in order to finish their degrees
they had to take their classes clandestinely – sometimes in fields, sometimes
in hidden back rooms and other places. They constantly lived in fear of
being caught by the Israeli Occupation Forces. Their only
"crime" was wanting to get an education. Similarly since the beginning of the second intifada, Israel has regularly closed down Palestinian education institutions.
Today, Palestinians are regularly prevent from getting an education, from
attending their schools and universities by not only by Israel's occupation
forces (IOF) but also by the apartheid wall. Their education institutes are often forced to close, their campuses are often raided by
the IOF, their classes disrupted and teachers and students regularly arrested,
tortured and killed. It is still an exceeding common occurrence for Palestinian
teachers to conduct classes at checkpoints because they and their students
can’t get to their education institutes. As one Palestinian
teacher has stated:

“I
teach at the Qurduba School in Hebron. To get to school we have to pass though
an area around Israeli settlers that the military controls. After protesting
the delays, a special “teachers-only” line was introduced that allowed us to
pass freely to and from the school. Recently, however, the IDF shut that line
down. What used to take five minutes can now be an hour-long process. While we
are planning ways to protest against these measures, we must endure this
humiliation daily, just to teach our classes.”

There are also numerous instances of where the apartheid wall cuts students and teachers off from their education institutions and prevents them from getting an education or results in students and teachers having to travel extended distances for long periods of time to get to school or university.

Palestinian teacher teaching students at a checkpoint in the Occupied West Bank

So if we are going to talk about “academic freedom” and its curtailing, lets
talk about this.This is where there is a really attack on academic freedom is
happening, this where the real restriction on the right to students to get an
education and a real undermining of the rights of teachers and academics is
taking place in the Palestine-Israel context.

For more information on this, please check out the Palestinian Right to Education
campaign (click here)

See also: The Daily Ordeal of getting to School in Hebron, published on Electronic Intifada (click here)

Nakba Keys

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About Me

I am an activist who, at different times over several years, has lived and worked as a international volunteer in the West Bank of the Occupied Palestinian Territories. This blog is an account of my time in Palestine and also carries original news, comment and analysis (as well as reprints) on Palestine. Live from Occupied Palestine campaigns for an end to Israeli apartheid and the brutal illegal occupation of the Palestinian people. You are welcome to reprint any material from this blog authored by Kim, however, please acknowledge the author and the blog website